Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

amazonlightsail.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 631 posts

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#341

Post by reacharavindh »

mark-wagner wrote: post #254
reacharavindh wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looks like you can spin up three of these instances as a proxy and pay $15 for 3 TB of bandwidth from AWS.

Where do you see that? To me it looks like bandwidth is plan-wide. For example, from the FAQ: "If you delete your instance early and create another one, the free data transfer allowance is shared between the two instances."

Full quote from FAQ : "How does my data transfer allowance work?

Beyond the free data transfer IN and between instances, every single Lightsail plan also includes a healthy amount of free data transfer OUT. For example, using the cheapest Lightsail bundle you can send up to 1 TB of data to the Internet within the month, at no extra charge. Your data transfer allowance resets every month, and you can consume it whenever you need within the month.

If you delete your instance early and create another one, the free data transfer allowance is shared between the two instances. Data transfer overages above the free allowance are charged at $0.09/GB. "

I assumed that each light sail instance would get the 1 TB bandwidth. But, the FAQ seem to suggest that each plan gets 1 TB. I can't tell if I can provision one VM of each plan and proxy bandwidth through. Say for $5 + $10 VM costs, I get 1 TB + 2 TB bandwidths..

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#342

Post by vacri »

setq wrote: post #321
cpollard0 wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They put the caps on to help with the very problem you are all bitching about; provisioning a ton of resources and getting a big bill. It's very easy to raise the cap.

I wasn't complaining about that. I've had 2-3 day turnarounds on "everything is broken" events on normal AWS VPC. Always factor their support offering in as well.

What level of support did you have? I've been on developer or first-level business support, and generally get someone knowledgeable; only the timing changes.

The only bad experience I had was with SES - we got blocked by high bounce rate, sending to a test email that did not exist (specifically because it was a test email). It took two days for the special unblock team to unblock us, even though the general support guy I was talking to had responded a couple of times in that wait period.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#343

Post by brilliantcode »

What a day for AWS on HN. 8 AWS products made it to front page. I've learned new AWS product like Cognito today just from the comments (ironically in the "Google is Challenging AWS" thread).

I feel as excited as I was for Azure's Build 2016. Now I'm feeling pulled to AWS. This is great for AWS, not so much for Google Cloud which further fades into obscurity in my mind. I'd love to see that change, more competition in the cloud space = more options for us developers = more conditions in our favour.

Amazon LightSail just killed digitalocean for me which has been steadily getting more expensive (for instance I can't downsize to a less expensive plan once I resize my image, meaning I forked out $100/month for something that would work for $5/month + multiple DO images now cost monthly fee.

$5/month + tight integration with AWS products is enough for me to move completely off DO. If only AWS had DO's community style documentation, I'd definitely question DO's future viability.

Now a killer IDE from AWS that lets me deploy and configure AWS without leaving the IDE, that's a checkmate move, which I think will be very difficult for me to switch to another cloud provider. Right now things are in flux but I think an in-browser/desktop IDE like Cloud 9 with one click deploy to AWS would be the end game for other cloud providers.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#344

Post by vacri »

cpollard0 wrote: post #217
wildpeaks wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, the lack of cost ceiling is the #1 reason I can't pick AWS.

The cost ceiling are the initial resource limits. Maybe you can ask them to lower the limits?

Not for bandwidth, though. That's where AWS gets you. All the complaining of server costs are the AWS of yesteryear - servers are pretty similar in costs to competitors now. But traffic doesn't have any caps that I'm aware of.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#345

Post by fweespeech »

The_suffocated wrote: post #195
geerlingguy wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> $0.005/hour That's $3.60/month... seems similar to mail-in rebates—many people forget, and accidentally give Amazon some (mostly) free money. Also, from later in this thread: > FWIW, bandwidth overages at Linode and DO are $0.02 per GB, LightSail is $0.09. It's these seemingly-tiny (but not-so-tiny when I'm running 60-70 VPSes) costs that kill when you get your first bill after a large traffic event.

Would anyone please tell me which of Linode, DigitalOcean and Vultr have cost ceilings? I looked at their pricing pages but couldn't figure out. They all claim that they have monthly billing caps for the hourly rates, but meanwhile, both DO and Vultr have per-GB charges if the transfer quota are exceeded, and Linode is silent on this on its pricing or FAQ pages. Can the data transfer charges be capped too? If so, wha…

> Would anyone please tell me which of Linode, DigitalOcean and Vultr have cost ceilings? I looked at their pricing pages but couldn't figure out. They all claim that they have monthly billing caps for the hourly rates, but meanwhile, both DO and Vultr have per-GB charges if the transfer quota are exceeded, and Linode is silent on this on its pricing or FAQ pages. Can the data transfer charges be capped too? If so, what happens when the quota is reached?

They don't for traffic. So you do run a small risk of something happening.

However, Linode at least pools your VPSs so if you have 100 of them and 20 of them "go over" the cap you still are often okay because of the other 80 that didn't "go over".

The truth is none of these providers provide truly hard caps. The difference is with Amazon/Google/Azure/etc you can realistically get hit with a 4 figure bill if something goes seriously wrong.

DO/Linode/Vultr I've never seen accidental "mistakes" causing that sort of thing and even an active dos/ddos attack that would cost you more than $100 in overages before they started null routing you.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#346

Post by swamp40 »

Someone1234 wrote: post #3

Just to be clear: This service is offered by Amazon/AWS themselves, it isn't a third party. That's a question I had when I first clicked, which is why I am answering it here. One big "gotcha" for AWS newbies which I cannot tell if this addresses: Does this set or allow the user to set a cost ceiling? AWS have offered billing alerts since forever. They'll also occasionally refund unexpected expenses (one time thing).…

>> But they've never offered a hard "suspend my account" ceiling that a lot of people with limited budgets have asked for.

That's probably where most of their profit comes from. That option was most likely squashed from the highest authority.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#347

Post by Guest98123 »

user5994461 wrote: post #331
Guest98123 wrote: post #207

Let me get this straight, right now AWS is billing me $270/mo for 3TB of bandwidth on my autoscaling web servers. With LightSail, I can get that same bandwidth, plus storage and instances for $15/mo? In total, I'm spending about $15,000/yr on AWS, and someone spending $5/mo gets their bandwidth 18x cheaper than me? Shouldn't it be the other way around, and I should be the one with the discount? I get enough headaches…

Do you use a CDN? If no. You should use a CDN.

I use a CDN for js/css/fonts/images, but the $270/mo is the bandwidth for the gzipped HTML going out from the web servers.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#349

Post by vacri »

thecrazyone wrote: post #330
shostack wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like they saw all these consumers being screwed by ISP and cell provider data caps and astronomical accidental overage fees and went "how do we get in on that action?!"

Hehe, sounds pretty much like what they've been doing. Really wish they bring some of that customer centric-ness they talk about to this aspect

They frequently refund mistaken overages.

Re: Amazon LightSail: Simple Virtual Private Servers on AWS

#350

Post by robot »

Someone1234 wrote: post #3

Just to be clear: This service is offered by Amazon/AWS themselves, it isn't a third party. That's a question I had when I first clicked, which is why I am answering it here. One big "gotcha" for AWS newbies which I cannot tell if this addresses: Does this set or allow the user to set a cost ceiling? AWS have offered billing alerts since forever. They'll also occasionally refund unexpected expenses (one time thing).…

"Just to be clear: This service is offered by Amazon/AWS themselves, it isn't a third party. "

says Someone1234. Should we believe it?

Post reply on HN